Search This Blog

The Hoba Meteorite, Estimated At 66 Tons, Left No Crater When It Fell To Earth

Virtually every day, Earth is bombarded with some 100 pounds of meteoric material. Down come bits and pieces of asteroids, and similar debris composed of rock, iron, and nickel that have been encircling in space for billions of years. When they happen to fall to Earth, rarely is any damage done.

Of course, some meteorites have made it into the news, and others, well, at least one did manage to wipe out life on Earth. Like that time some 65 million years ago, when a big piece of meteorite sent the dinosaurs into extinction. But that’s rare.

What made the news in 1992, a far less hazardous instance of a falling meteorite, was when a rock the size of a bowling ball crashed into a driveway in Peekskill, New York. With a loud bang, the rock made a crater on a parked orange 1980 Chevrolet Malibu. For its size, the ball was astonishingly heavy, weighing about 28 pounds. Except for the car, luckily, there weren’t any casualties.

In the case of the Hoba meteorite, however, which is considered to be the world’s largest known meteorite piece with a weight of some 119,000 pounds–estimated at 66 tons–perhaps the strangest aspect of all is that it left no crater once it fell to Earth. Scientists have suggested that the massive rock apparently slowed down as it penetrated Earth’s atmosphere. It slowed so much that the Hoba reached a point of terminal velocity as it was about to impact the surface where it fell, which was in Namibia.

That is why the Hoba meteorite has remained intact. As big and bulky as it is, never in history has this huge an iron rock been repositioned from its “impact” point. While excavated, it hasn’t been moved. Lurking hidden on a farm in the central-north parts of Namibia, in the proximity of the city of Grootfontein, the Hoba meteorite, or Hoba West as it is also known, was discovered by a farmer almost by chance.

The name of the farmer was Hermanus Brits, and he stumbled on the piece in 1920 as he was working at the Hoba farm, which gave the meteorite its name. As Brits described the moment of discovery, it was only the upper part of the rock that was visible. Its color was black, and the soil around it was all chalky. “I scratched the rock with my knife and saw there was a shine beneath the surface,” one of his statements read.

After Brits notified local authorities about the find, it was quickly determined that this was a meteorite. The bulky rock is composed of 84 percent iron and 15 percent nickel, and as a type of iron meteorite, it is one of the most remarkable examples ever encountered on Earth’s surface.

About 5 percent of the total number of meteorite pieces that fall on Earth are similar in their composition to the Hoba one. They are also massive, but not like this one, at least, not for now. Due to the presence of a rare radioactive nickel isotope, experts have been able to determine the age of the Hoba meteorite, which is estimated at in-between 190 million and 410 million years. And it ended its traversing through space once it fell on Earth a little less than 80,000 years ago.

The first significant scientific analyses about this particular meteorite were produced by 1929, and ever since, the megalith has been gaining fame, while also suffering from vandals who have slightly helped shrink the original mass of Hoba. For protecting the enormous iron rock, local authorities have made efforts in protecting it by developing a manageable visitor site around Hoba.

The megalith was designated as a national monument in Namibia back in 1955. This status was canceled in 1979 and renewed during that same year as the site surrounding the rock extended. By the end of the 1980s, an information center purposed to educate the public about the meteorite was also constructed on the site.

Of course, this is not the first place you’ll think of visiting when planning your next great journey, but hey, where else can you see the largest iron rock on Earth if not here, in Namibia?

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Scientists
said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light - a
finding that could overturn one of Einstein's fundamental laws of the universe.
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, saidthat measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near
Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light
would have done.

“We
have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything
that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said.
"We now want colleagues to check them independently.” If
confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of
special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic
constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster. That
assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key
elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, whic…

NASA’s Kepler Space
Telescope discovered an Earth-like planet circling a nearby star within the
Goldilocks zone of our galaxy. Kepler-186f is around 500 light-years from Earth
in the Cygnus constellation. The habitable zone, also identified as the
Goldilocks zone, is the area around a star within which planetary-mass objects
with enough atmospheric pressure can sustain liquid water at their surfaces.

While it has been
projected that there are at least 40 billion Earth-sized planets circling in
our Milky Way Galaxy, this specific finding is labelled the first Earth-sized
planet to be discovered in the habitable zone of another star. What does this mean?In addition to
Kepler-186f, there are 4 other planets that circle a nearby star within the
Kepler-186f system. What this means is that if the neighbouring star to this
planet is just like our Sun, then the likelihood of life on this planet
exponentially increases.

“We know of only one
planet where life survives – Earth. When we hunt for lif…

The reason why certain countries looks bigger or smaller than others is because of something called the Mercator Projection. Putting a 3D planet on a two-dimensional map was something of a challenge for early cartographers and so a Flemish geographer and cartographer named Gerardus Mercator came up with a solution. In 1569 he designed a map that could be accurately used for navigation purposes, but the downside was that his system distorted the size of objects depending on their position relative to the equator. Because of this, landmasses like Antarctica and Greenland appeared much larger than they actually are.

To show how incorrect our understanding of country sizes is, a website called thetruesize.com lets you move landmasses into different locations. Bored Panda has played a bit on this site, and this is what we found. #1 US Moved Down Next To Australia Looks Unbelievably Small

#2 Russia On The Equator Is Not A Giant Bear Anymore #3 If Romania Was An Island In The Arctic Ocean #4 Aust…